The Museum
SEPTEMBER 2011 – JUNE 2012
LOOKING AHEAD:
• Opening November 1, 2011:
New
Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran,
Central Asia, and Later South Asia
• Opening
January 16, 2012:
New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture,
and Decorative Arts
NEW EXHIBITIONS:
Contemporary
Artists
Explore the Secret Life of Museums
and Their Collections in Spies
in the House of Art
Installation
Dates: February 7 – August 26, 2012
Installation Location: Joyce and
Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography
Since the 1980s, a number of contemporary artists working in photography, film, and video have taken as their subject the art museum and how we view specific works from the canon of art history. Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art from February 7 through August 26, 2012, draws largely from the Museum’s collection to focus on artists from the last three decades who explore the secret lives of museums. This installation in the Joyce and Robert Menschel Hall for Modern Photography features 17 works, half of which have never been shown before at the Metropolitan.
Among the highlights of this presentation are Francesca Woodman’s Blueprint for a Temple and Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer’s Flash in the Metropolitan , a 16mm film shot after-hours in the Museum’s galleries. Also included are photographs and videos by contemporary artists Lutz Bacher, Lothar Baumgarten, Sophie Calle, Tim Davis, Andrea Fraser, Candida Höfer, Louise Lawler, John Pilson, Cindy Sherman, Lorna Simpson , and Thomas Struth , as well as two works from the mid-20th century by Diane Arbus and Joseph Cornell and a print by Peter Nagy. A complement of a dozen photographs from the medium’s beginnings to the early 1970s by Eugène Atget, René Magritte, Edward Steichen, and Dan Weiner, among others, will be shown nearby in the Robert Wood Johnson Jr. Gallery.
Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video explores the complex relationship between artists and museums: how artists are inspired by the collections that museums display and are challenged by the authority that museums represent. The title plays on Anaïs Nin’s 1954 novel “A Spy in the House of Love,” and an artful balance of detachment and engagement, watchfulness and desire informs many of the works on display.
The centerpiece of the installation is the 16mm film Flash in the Metropolitan (2006) by the London-based artists Rosalind Nashashibi and Lucy Skaer . Using a strobe light, Nashibishi flashed brief illumination on sculpture and objects in the Metropolitan’s darkened galleries of Greek and Roman art, Ancient Near Eastern art, and the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, as well as the Medieval Sculpture Hall. As a result, the works of art—often devotional in their original function— become uncannily enlivened and animated, like actors in a mysterious new ritual.
Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman both imaginatively project the female form into the often male canon of art history. In Sherman’s renowned History Portraits series of photographs (1988-90), the artist imitated famous paintings of men and women from the Renaissance to the early 19th century. While on a yearlong fellowship in Rome, Sherman scoured local flea markets for costumes and props to make her self-portrait as a satiated Italian monk, featured in this installation. By aping the grand scale of Old Master paintings, Sherman showed how photography could compete against the grandiose Neo-Expressionist canvases of the 1980s, while making a stand for women artists working in a medium that was marginalized at the time.
Francesca Woodman , the daughter of two artists, grew up in Boulder, Colorado and Tuscany, and studied art in Rome in the late 1970s. This formative experience led to the creation of Blueprint for a Temple (1980), a 15-by-11-foot collage composed of 29 photographs on blueprint paper. Woodman was interested in making a monument to the faded traces of antiquity as they survived into the present. She posed friends and models as sculptural caryatids and composed the portico from pictures of black-and- white tiling commonly found in the bathrooms of New York City tenement apartments. This monumental work has been exhibited only once, at New York’s Alternative Museum in 1980, less than a year before Woodman died at the age of 22.
Another type of imaginative projection that takes place in the encounter between the artist and museum can be seen in Andrea Fraser’s humorous 30-minute video Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk (1989). Set in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Museum High l ights features Fraser performing her own script, culled and pieced together from a wide variety of museum publications and historical and sociological texts. Fraser’s character, the fictional docent Jane Castleton, aspires to be the ideal embodiment of the museum guide, yet her well-intended tour leads her astray into discussions of the restroom and coat checks. In an unprecedented commingling of old and new works, Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk will be exhibited alongside paintings by William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Alexandre Cabanel, and Franz Xaver Winterhalter in the Galleries of Nineteenth Century, Modern, and Contemporary Art, just around the corner from the main installation.
Like Cindy Sherman, the French artist Sophie Calle explores what the viewer brings to a work of art and how that experience completes its meaning. For her 1986 series Blind, the artist met people who were blind since birth and asked them about their image of beauty. Calle photographed her subjects’ faces, printed their answers, and reproduced what each interviewee could only see in his or her mind’s eye. In the work included here, a teenager unabashedly admits the carnal desire provoked by a bronze nude in the Rodin Museum in Paris.
The vital function that museums provide as a conduit between the art of the past and the needs of the present is evoked brilliantly in a major work acquired recently by the Museum, The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples (1988) by Thomas Struth . One of the artist’s first portraits, the photograph depicts four art conservators standing in a refectory where paintings that had been damaged in a recent earthquake were gathered for restoration. In The Restorers , Struth brings together the ideal and the real, epitomized by the central female figure, who seems to have stepped right out of one of the paintings under her care. This work also prefigures the artist’s large-scale color photographs of people looking at art in museums, churches, and other “cathedrals of culture” for a secular age.
Spies in the House of Art: Photography, Film, and Video is organized by Douglas Eklund, Associate Curator in the Department of Photographs.
Installation tours, gallery talks linking the themes of the installation to other modern and contemporary works in the collections, and teen programs will be offered in conjunction with this installation.
The
installation will be featured on the Museum’s website at www.metmuseum.org
.
Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine
September 13, 2011–March 4, 2012
Consisting mostly
of works from the Metropolitan Museum’s rich collection of
drawings and prints, the exhibition will explore humorous
imagery from the Italian Renaissance to the present. The
show will include sheets by Leonardo da Vinci, Eugène
Delacroix, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and
Enrique Chagoya, alongside works by artists more often
associated with the genre such as James Gillray, Thomas
Rowlandson, Honoré Daumier, and Al Hirschfeld. These
works will explore the range of this age-old tradition from
the elevated to the rudely humorous.
The exhibition is
made possible by The Schiff Foundation.
Accompanied by a
catalogue.
Perino del Vaga in New York Collections
September 27, 2011—February 5, 2012
Perino del Vaga
(Pietro Buonaccorsi, 1501-1547), one of the outstanding
figures in Raphael’s workshop, was a leading innovator of
the late Renaissance style known as Mannerism. The
Metropolitan Museum recently acquired a painting and drawing
by this rare but important master which will be featured in
this exhibition. The centerpiece will be the painting Holy
Family with Saint John the Baptist , a masterpiece from the
artist’s early years in Rome (ca. 1525). The painting has
been newly restored and will be featured with the Museum’s
other recent acquisition by the artist, a highly finished
drawing of Jupiter and Juno reclining on a marriage bed—a
design for a tapestry for the artist’s Genoese patron,
Andrea Doria. In addition to this superlative drawing, the
exhibition will include approximately 20 related drawings
and prints as well as a painting from a private collection
and loans from the Morgan Library & Museum, the Tobey
Collection, and other New York private collections.
The Making of a Collection:
Collectors of Islamic Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art
November 1, 2011–Spring 2012
Due to the
generosity of dedicated individuals who collected Islamic
art and supported the Museum with outstanding gifts and
donations, The Metropolitan Museum of Art now houses one of
the largest comprehensive collections of this material in
the world. This exhibition will consider the factors that
directed and inspired major donor-collectors, whose gifts
form the core of the collection of the Museum’s Department
of Islamic Art.
The Game of Kings: Medieval Ivory Chessmen from the Isle of Lewis
November 15, 2011–April 22, 2012
More than 30 of
the world’s most famous chess pieces—all part of a hoard
unearthed in 1831 on the Isle of Lewis, off the west coast
of Scotland—will be shown at The Cloisters, the branch of
the Metropolitan Museum dedicated to the art and
architecture of medieval Europe. Created in the mid-12th
century, probably in Scandinavia, each piece is a precious
miniature sculpture in walrus ivory. The game of chess as we
know it today is one of the great legacies of the Middle
Ages, and the Lewis chess pieces are among the earliest that
include the full cast of characters found on modern boards.
Reflecting medieval society in Europe, there are bishops
(replacing the elephants of Indian and Persian chess
traditions) and queens (supplanting the viziers who stand at
the king’s side in Islamic tradition). The Lewis Chessmen
are on loan from the British Museum.
The exhibition is
made possible by the Michel David-Weill Fund.
Storytelling in Japanese Art
November 19, 2011–May 6, 2012
Japan has enjoyed
a long tradition of narrative painting, one that continues
even today with the popular contemporary Japanese cartoon (
manga ) and animation. Historically, the subjects of
narrative painting have varied: romances of court ladies,
aristocrats, and monks; heroic warriors’ tales of courage in
the face of overwhelming odds; stories of miracles,
celebratory events, and personal accomplishments; and tales
of animals and ghosts. Illustrated tales appear in various
formats: handscrolls ( emaki ), albums, books, hanging
scrolls, and screens. This exhibition will show a wide
variety of illustrated Japanese tales from the 13th to the
19th century that reflect the cultural and social landscape
of the time. The exhibition will feature approximately 70
works, including a group of 30 illustrated handscrolls, the
ideal format for continuous sequential illustration, and 20
scrolls, books, and screens from New York Public Library and
other local collections as well as from the Museum’s own
collection.
The exhibition is
made possible by The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Foundation.
Additional support
is provided by the Japan Foundation.
Accompanied by a
catalogue.
The Coe Collection of American Indian Art
December 6, 2011–May 28, 2012
Drawn from works
given and bequeathed to the Metropolitan during the past
decade by Ralph T. Coe of Santa Fe, New Mexico, the
exhibition is comprised of some 30 objects made in natural
materials from stone to animal hide. It features a wide
range of Native American works that come from different
times, from far-flung places, and from numerous distinct
peoples. The oldest pieces in the Coe Collection date to
some thousands of years BCE. The major part of the
collection dates from the 19th to early 20th century, a
period of great contact between Native Americans and
outsiders of all sorts, from traders to missionaries to the
U.S. army. The peoples of the Great Plains are prominent
during this time, and objects such as the impressive,
personalized hide shirts of important Indian men have come
to identify American Indians in the public mind; there is
such a shirt in the exhibition. Representing contemporary
work, which is also found in the Coe Collection, is a mask
dated to the year 2001—an imposing wood sculpture of a Noble
Woman by the Northwest Coast Haida artist Robert Davidson is
a product of a long, deeply felt tradition for the carving
of wood.
The exhibition will
be funded by Friends of the Arts of Africa, Oceania, and the
Americas.
Duncan Phyfe: Master Cabinetmaker in New York
December 20, 2011–May 6, 2012
Referred to
during his lifetime as the "United States Rage," Duncan
Phyfe (1768-1854) remains to this day America's best-known
cabinetmaker. This will be the first major retrospective on
Phyfe since 1922, when the Metropolitan mounted a
monographic show on the cabinetmaker and his work. The
exhibition will cover the full chronological sweep of
Phyfe's distinguished career. It will include his earliest
and best known furniture based on the published designs of
Thomas Sheraton, as well as work from the middle and later
stages of his career, when he adopted the richer
"archaeological" antique style of the 1820s, and a refined,
plain Grecian style based on French Restauration prototypes.
The exhibition is
made possible by Karen H. Bechtel.
Additional support
is provided by The Henry Luce Foundation, Dr. and Mrs. Paul
Cushman, the Americana Foundation, Mr. Robert L. Froelich,
and Mr. Philip Holzer.
It was organized by
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Museum of
Fine Arts, Houston.
Accompanied by a
catalogue.
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini
December 21, 2011–March 18, 2012
It has been said
that the Renaissance witnessed the rediscovery of the
individual. The 15th century was certainly the first great
age of portraiture in Italy, where for the first time
artists produced likenesses and explored means of suggesting
personality. Featuring many rare international loans, The
Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini will present
an unprecedented survey of portraiture in all media:
paintings and sculpture as well as medals and drawings.
Taken together, these works document the birth of
portraiture in early modern Europe. The exhibition, which
will be divided into three sections and span a period of
eight decades, will begin in Florence, where independent
portraits first appeared in abundance, then move to the
courts of Ferrara, Mantua, Bologna, Milan, Urbino, Naples,
and papal Rome, and end in Venice. Approximately 130 works
will be on view by artists including Donatello, Botticelli,
Verrocchio, Ghirlandaio, Mantegna, and Giovanni Bellini,
testifying to the new vogue for and uses of portraiture in
15th-century Italy.
The exhibition is
made possible by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation, the
Diane W. and James E. Burke Fund, the Gail and Parker
Gilbert Fund, and The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation.
The exhibition was
organized by Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu
Berlin and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
It is supported by
an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the
Humanities.
Accompanied by a
catalogue.
New
Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran,
Central Asia, and Later South Asia
Opening November 1, 2011
More than 1,000 works
from the preeminent collection of the Museum’s Department of
Islamic Art—one of the most comprehensive gatherings of this
material in the world—will return to view this fall in a
completely renovated, expanded, and reinstalled suite of 15
galleries. The organization of the galleries by geographical
area will emphasize the rich diversity of the Islamic world,
over a span of 1300 years, by underscoring the many distinct
cultures within its fold.
New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts
Opening January 16, 2012
This
third and final phase of the overall
American Wing renovation project
comprises 24 entirely new galleries on
the wing’s second floor. Twenty-one of
the galleries are for the display of
the permanent collection of American
paintings—including the rich holdings
of such masters as Gilbert Stuart,
Frederic Edwin Church, Winslow Homer,
Thomas Eakins, and John Singer
Sargent. Centered in the Grand Gallery
will be Emanuel Leutze’s monumental
and iconic Washington
Crossing the Delaware .
Interspersed among the pictures will
be American sculptures, notably the
work of Augustus Saint-Gaudens. Three
other galleries, together with a grand
pre-revolutionary New York interior,
will display 18th-century American
decorative arts, principally treasures
of colonial furniture and silver. In
the Henry R. Luce Center for the Study
of American Art, on the mezzanine
level, a concurrent renovation
includes additional casework,
touch-screen case labels, and upgraded
computer access.
Part 1 of the American Wing renovation
project opened in January 2007 with
galleries dedicated to the classical
arts of America, 1810-1845. Part 2,
inaugurated in May 2009, included the
renovated Charles Engelhard Court and
the Period Rooms. After Part 3 is
completed, nearly all of the American
Wing’s 17,000 works will be on view,
constituting an encyclopedic survey of
fine art in the United States.
Good Humor at the Met—Caricature and Satire
Explored in Infinite Jest at the Metropolitan Museum
Beginning September 13
Exhibition
Dates: September 13,
2011–March 4, 2012
Exhibition
Location: Galleries for Drawings, Prints, and
Photographs
Press
Preview: Monday,
September 12, 10 a.m.–noon
Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from Leonardo to Levine , on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art September 13, 2011, through March 4, 2012, will explore humorous imagery from the Italian Renaissance to the present. Consisting mostly of works from the Metropolitan Museum’s rich collection in its Department of Drawings and Prints, the exhibition will include sheets by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci, Eugène Delacroix, Francisco de Goya, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and Enrique Chagoya alongside works by artists more often associated with visual humor, such as James Gillray, Thomas Rowlandson, Honoré Daumier, Al Hirschfeld, and David Levine. Many of these engaging caricatures and satires have never been exhibited and are little known except to specialists.
The exhibition is made possible by The Schiff Foundation.
The exhibition’s title, Infinite Jest , derives from Hamlet . Shakespeare’s play is quoted in a Civil War print from the 1864 presidential campaign caricaturing Democratic candidate General George McClellan as Hamlet and his Republican opponent, President Abraham Lincoln, as the exhumed skull from the play’s gravedigger’s scene, using the famous line: “I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest.”
The exhibition will be divided into four sections and will begin by exploring the building blocks of caricature, a genre that artists employed through the centuries, exaggerating faces and physiques, showing people as animals and objects, and displaying humorous figures in processions. In its purest form, caricature—from the Italian carico and caricare , “to load” and “exaggerate”—distorts human physical characteristics and can be combined with various kinds of satire to convey personal, social, or political meaning. Although caricature has probably existed since artists began to draw (ancient examples are known), the form took shape in Europe when Leonardo da Vinci’s drawings of grotesque heads were copied by followers and distributed as prints.
In the 17th century, Gian Lorenzo Bernini entertained European monarchs with caricatures, and the form was also taken up by Guercino, Pier Leone Ghezzi, and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo. Highlights of this section will include Leonardo da Vinci’s Head of a Man in Profile, Facing Left , together with caricature drawings by Tiepolo and Francois-André Vincent, as well as a rich range of prints by Louis Léopold Boilly, Thomas Rowlandson, James Gillray, and even Nadar, who was an active caricaturist.
The second section of the exhibition will examine social satire expressed in works devoted to eating and drinking, gambling, male and female fashion, art, and crowds. The 18th and 19th centuries are known as the golden age of caricature and satire, with William Hogarth, Gillray, Rowlandson, and George Cruikshank producing lively examples in Britain, and Honoré Daumier and Boilly doing the same in France. These artists cleverly inserted recognizable caricatures into satirical frameworks to mock contemporary society. Extreme fashion provided satirists with an ever-changing source of humor beginning in the 1760s and a selection of sartorial caricatures will be on view.
Politics will be the focus of the exhibition’s third section, featuring prints produced in response to the American and French revolutions, to Napoleon’s conquest of Europe, and to French, Mexican, and American politics of the 19th and early 20th centuries, including the American Civil War. Rare anonymous satires produced in France when censorship eased in the 1790s will be on view, accompanied by famous designs by Gillray and Daumier. Striking designs by such unexpected caricaturists as the French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix will also be included.
The exhibition will end with a group of caricatures of notable people from the 19th to the 21st century. Images in this section will include Al Hirschfeld’s Americans in Paris from 1951, depicting a lively crowd at the Café de la Paix that includes the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, the boxer Sugar Ray Robinson, Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Hirschfeld himself with his wife, the actress Dolly Haas, and their young daughter Nina. The most recent piece in the exhibition will be Enrique Chagoya’s The Headache , A Print after George Cruikshank from 2010, in which Chagoya adapted an 19th-century print by Cruikshank called The Head Ache to include President Obama's face as a statement about the country’s recent debates on health care.
Infinite Jest is organized by Constance C. McPhee, Associate Curator, and Nadine M. Orenstein, Curator, both of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Drawings and Prints.
The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue written by Constance C. McPhee and Nadine M. Orenstein. It is published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Yale University Press, and will be available in the Museum’s book shops (hardcover, $45).
The catalogue is made possible by the Charles Bloom Foundation.
A variety of education programming will be offered in conjunction with the exhibition. Highlights include a Sunday at the Met program on October 16, gallery talks, films, and a teen program. Unless otherwise noted, all programs are free with Museum admission. Program details and more information about the exhibition can be found at www.metmuseum.org .
Related
Exhibition at the Metropolitan
In conjunction with
the exhibition Infinite Jest: Caricature and Satire from
Leonardo to Levine , an installation of recently acquired
prints and drawings from the Metropolitan Museum’s
collection will be on display in the Robert Wood Johnson,
Jr. Gallery through January 9, 2012. This group will consist
mostly of works of modern political satire by artists Robbie
Conal, David Levine, and Pat Oliphant.
